Services were rarely less than two hours, ten to noon. Aunt Ruth and I went every Sunday. Ruth joined the choir, and then the women’s Bible study. As promised, Ruth had me join Firepower, the teen group.
What I remember from Sunday school at First Presbyterian was kind Mrs. Ness teaching us to sing “Jesus Loves Me,” her silver hair in a bun, a guitar in her lap. I also remember the children’s Bible they gave us, with its bright-colored pictures of pairs of animals boarding the ark, and Moses parting a very red sea, and a long-haired Jesus walking across water, his arms stretched wide, somehow reminding me of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. And I remember that during the services it was just row after row of old people repeating some verses, painful organ music, a lengthy sermon that was hard for me to follow. Right from the start, Gates of Praise was different.
It wasn’t enough to accept that Jesus had died for my sins, and to try and not break any of the Ten Commandments, to be kind to people. Things at GOP were much more specific than that. Evil, I learned, was all around me, constantly needing to be battled. Being a true believer meant helping others, lots of others, to believe just like me. To be an agent of God for evangelizing the world. Rather than convincing me of the righteousness of this kind of believing, rather than making me certain of its correctness, it made me question, and doubt, all the more. I knew it wasn’t how my parents had thought about the world, about God. I guess we hadn’t discussed it specifically all that many times, but this, I knew, wasn’t their version.
At my first Firepower meeting our adviser, Maureen Beacon, who looked weirdly, weirdly like Kathy Bates, gave me my very own Extreme Teen Bible. We were in the big meeting room at the back of the church, and there were dozens of kids my age and older filling plastic cups with Sunny Delight and milling around the snack table, plucking grapes from bunches and tossing them at each other, and each and every one of them had a copy. The Extreme Teen Bible had a black cover with hot-blue writing and these laser-type neon bolts everywhere, symbolizing what, I don’t know. I don’t remember our group-discussion concerns from that first meeting—maybe Christian Teens and Anorexia, maybe Christian Teens and TV Watching; but no matter what the topic, from Acne to Dating, our Extreme Teen Bible had it covered.
I hadn’t ever known exactly what the Bible said about the way that I felt about Irene, the way that I knew I could let myself feel about other girls. I had some vague idea that it wasn’t too favorable, but I had never sought out the hard evidence. That night of the first Firepower, after I got home, I went to my room, put on Fatal Attraction as my background movie, and searched out homosexuality under the handy Topics to Consider contents inside the front cover. I underlined passages from Romans and Corinthians. I read all about Sodom and Gomorrah, had questions about the nature of brimstone. Though what seemed to me the most specifically damning passage, Leviticus 18:22, only mentioned male homosexuality (when a man lies with a man, this is an abomination), this didn’t actually make me feel any better. My Extreme Teen Bible had explicit notes in the margins: “Man with a man” can be expressly understood to mean any and all forms of same-sex attraction and same-sex acts. I read that line probably ten times. Things seemed clear enough.
I was all sprawled out on my stomach, my feet on my pillows, my face so close to the TV screen, I could feel the static electricity pulling my hair toward it. I closed the Bible, let it slide off the mattress and thunk on the floor. My twelve-year-old mom, as always, watched me from the Quake Lake photo.
“I’m not gonna be ignored!” Glenn Close was telling Michael Douglas, her own hair that unraveled kind of messy that showed just how crazy she was about to get. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jeans so that I was lying on my arms, all of me one long mass. The knuckles of my right hand jammed against something I hadn’t remembered was there: a jagged piece of bright-purple fluorite that I’d nicked from the Earth Science room during mineral lab.
I took it out and rolled it against my fingers. It was warm from my pocket and glassy smooth along some of its sides, sandpaper rough on others. I put it in my mouth for a moment to feel the weight of it against my tongue, to hear it click along my teeth. It tasted like the Earth Science room smelled—like metal and dirt. I was still holding it against the roof of my mouth, half watching the movie, half not, when I glanced at the dollhouse, lurking, lurking, as always. I decided that piece of fluorite would look nice, would even look right, somehow, hanging above the fireplace in the room I thought of as the library. So instead of waiting and thinking about it more, or wondering about doing it, I got up, scavenged around in my desk until I found a tiny tube of Super Glue, and then stuck it there, just above the fireplace, with Glenn Close boiling a bunny in the background.
I’d been keeping a little collection of things that I’d taken from various places. I had it in the back of one of my desk drawers. I spread it all out on top of my quilt and knelt at the side of the bed to look at it all there, my plunder. It didn’t add up to much, just small things: an authentic Nixon campaign button from Mr. Hutton’s bulletin board; a thermometer magnet of praying Jesus from the fridge in the kitchen at GOP; a tiny glass frog from counselor Nancy Huntley’s desk; an aluminum ashtray from the bowling alley, the disposable kind, with bowl-n-fun on it in red; a Swiss Army knife keychain a kid in my World History class had hanging from his backpack; a beautiful all-color origami flower one of the Japanese exchange students had made; one of those cut-apart school portraits of a kid I had babysat for once or twice; and also that picture of Champagne Margot I’d grabbed while she was in das Bad; an airplane-size bottle of vodka that I’d found during Mom’s office cleanout; and finally, a pack of Bubblicious that I’d taken from Kip’s Minute Mart just because I was thinking of Irene.
I started gluing more of my little treasures to that dollhouse. I made a gum-wrapper rug for the kitchen. I hung the Nixon button on the wall in what I imagined to be the oldest boy’s room. I put the frog in the garden and took the lampshade off a piece of my old dollhouse furniture to make a vodka-bottle floor lamp for the living room. The movie played on and then finished and then ran its credits, went to black screen, clicked off, rewound, started playing automatically again; I kept on gluing. It felt really good to do something that made no sense at all.
Part Two
High School
1991–1992
Chapter Five
The summer before freshman year I came home from swim team and there’s Aunt Ruth in the dining room with all these pink cartons spread around on the floor, on the table, and pink Styrofoam peanuts everywhere. She had her back to me, singing a little something, maybe it was Lesley Gore, maybe not, but definitely somebody from her high school days.
I dropped my backpack on the floor because I knew it’d startle her, and even though there were only the next fifty-some summer days between me and high school, I wasn’t above these immaturities.
She overdid the you startled me jump and turned around, a pink-handled hammer in hand. “Cameron, you startled me,” she said as if she was on a soap opera and had been caught rifling through someone else’s desk.
I nodded at the hammer. “What’s with the pink hammer?”
Her eyes flashed bright like when you first light a smoke bomb, all sulfur and heat. “It’s my Sally-Q Busy Lady Hammer. Meet Miles City’s first official Sally-Q Tool distributor.” She was doing her pageant smile; she was every infomercial I’d ever seen, with me as the studio audience.
She flittered around some peanuts in the carton nearest her and pulled out a small, pink cordless drill, pressed the On lever. It buzzed the way you’d expect a drill like that to buzz. Just exactly that way, like a mechanical hummingbird might: high-pitched and fast but without much presence.
“Actually, I’m the only Sally-Q Tool sales representative in eastern Montana. I’m a hub!” She let the drill buzz for a few seconds more and then clicked it off.
Already I could see the Sally-Q parties in the living room: a little spinach quiche, lemonade with min
t sprigs, and then the pitch: Practical can still be pretty. This isn’t your husband’s socket wrench.
She handed over the drill for me to marvel at. “They’re made in Ohio,” she said. “It’s all been researched and tested. These tools are built specifically for women.” She saw my face, which said back, I didn’t know other tools were built only for men. “It’s things like making the handles smaller and the grips closer together,” she said. “Even you have small hands, Cammie. Long fingers, but dainty hands.”
“They’re bony,” I told her, handing it back.
“They’re just like mine,” she said, but I barely had time to smirk at her immaculate manicure before she added, “and just like your mother’s, too.”
I remembered that we did have the same hands, my mother and I. I remembered pressing my palms to hers, waiting for my fingers to grow, to catch up, and how she’d use both of her hands to smooth cherry-almond lotion over one of mine, her skin warm, the lotion cool.
“You’re right,” I told Ruth, and it was a nice moment between us, this memory of my mother, her sister; but those pink boxes were everywhere, the sad confetti of pink packing peanuts, and I didn’t let the moment linger very long.
I went to the kitchen, got a granola bar. Ruth kept on with her unpacking, checking her inventory against an order form, again humming her song, or another one just like it. From the doorway, as I chewed, I took in all the tools, so many of them. They were stupid, but still, I was glad Ruth had this thing, because it would keep her busy, and I wanted her busy. I had plans for my summer break, for how I wanted to spend it. Or how I thought I did, anyway. And Ruth being occupied would help out with that, because what I had planned definitely wasn’t something Ruth would okay.
In May they had finished building the big medical center over on what had once been grazing land, and they left the carcass of the old hospital in the center of town. Though pretty much every kid in Miles City had been born there, and had visited the pediatrician Dr. Davies there, and had our broken bones set in pink and green casts, our ears tubed, our heads sewn with stitches there, once empty, Holy Rosary Hospital took on the eerie and irresistible aura of any massive and abandoned place.
There were nine empty stories of exam rooms, operating rooms, extended-care rooms, and offices, plus a cafeteria and kitchen still glinting with stainless-steel counters and shelves, all connected by a labyrinth of seemingly endless hallways—more than enough to occupy any mildly adventurous kid with a couple of friends game to go along.
But it was the older section of the hospital, the 1800s original dark brick building that was added onto in the 1920s and then again in the 1950s, that became the ultimate destination for dare fulfillment. It was creepy enough from the outside, the Spanish-style architecture crumbling from age, broken windows, a weathered stone cross at the top, all the classic dark-and-stormy-night elements. Any teenager could tell you that a place like that just had to be worse on the inside.
My first time, getting in was easy. Jamie Lowry had somehow stolen the bolt cutter from the janitor’s room at school. He had also brought a massive plastic bottle of Dr. McGillicuddy’s Peppermint Schnapps and one thin flashlight, both items buried beneath sweaty shorts and a jockstrap in his track practice bag. Since, as usual, I was the only girl invited along, I didn’t say anything about how gross peppermint schnapps is, even before it rides around with a sweaty jockstrap for a few hours.
Five of us from the team had skipped out early on the end-of-the-year pizza party, even before Hobbs did his signature move of eating all the remaining slices and crusts, the stuff left in the cardboard boxes sitting sad and abandoned in pools of orange grease. He would cram it all down, follow it with Mountain Dew, and then do jumping jacks until he puked. I’d seen it the year before, anyway.
Jamie had already broken into Holy Rosary once, with his older brother, so that plus the bolt cutter gave him authority, and he was loving it. “We didn’t get very far,” he told us on the way. “It’s really dark once you get inside, and we started out too late—the sun went down. But what we did see—the place is unreal.”
“But like how?” somebody had asked him, probably Michael, who didn’t really want to go anyway but would do things like this every so often, just so nobody stopped asking him altogether.
“Just wait, dude,” Jamie had said. “I’m serious. It’s fucking hard-core.” Since Jamie described everything from zombie movies to his parents’ fights to the new enchilada platter at Taco John’s as “fucking hard-core,” none of us could gauge much by it.
Once we were within the cover of the old hospital courtyard, its overgrown vines and shady trees, each of us took turns downing as much of the schnapps as we could. We did pretty well, considering the lukewarm temperature of the liquor and the piles of cheap pizza it was following after.
“Let’s rock this shit,” Jamie said, pulling out the cutter. “My bro and I busted in a window on the other side, but they boarded that up already.” He led us to a hatch just a couple of feet off the ground. “Used to be for deliveries,” he told us. “Goes straight into the basement.”
The padlock snipped off surprisingly easy, Jamie working one handle and Michael pushing the other. But once the wood panel was raised, the narrow steps offered up, Michael had done his part and said he had to get going.
“Fucking pussy,” Jamie said, and then he took a drink of the schnapps, all serious-like, trying to make it look tough and John Wayne, as if it was the code of the West or something: You curse a man, you take a swig. But he didn’t say it until Michael was already well out of the courtyard and probably feeling pretty good about his stint as the bad-ass.
I skipped my turn as the bottle was again passed around.
“You wanna leave too, Cameron?” Jamie asked me, and it pissed me off that he didn’t ask it the way he would have one of the guys. Instead it was in a mocking sort of baby-talk tone, all whiney. He asked it as sincerely as Jamie Lowry could, like it would be okay if I wanted to go, since I was just a girl and should be expected to be scared.
“I just don’t want to drink any more of that shit. It’s foul. Let’s do this already.”
“The lady has spoken,” Jamie said, and started down.
That flashlight was a joke. Even when it was working, it was just a skinny strip of light, and it was dead by maybe four minutes in, anyway. It had been such a rainy May, and the basement felt appropriately cryptlike: cobwebs around the doorframe ghosting our faces, that smell of dirt and rot and trapped air, and it was dark, totally dark. I mean, there was a patch of light from a window on the far side, just like one square of light, but it didn’t do anything to help us see where we were going. I could feel hot schnapps breath on my neck, probably from Murphy, maybe Paul, and I didn’t mind whoever it was being that close. His breath even smelled kind of good, pepperminty but rotten, somehow. I liked knowing someone was right behind me, though.
We were four of the stars of the junior-high track team, but we moved through that basement a few timid steps at a time. Even with all that pizza to sop it up, the liquor seeped its way through my arms, my legs, everything heightened and muffled at once. My mind kept replaying clips from all those slasher flicks I’d rented.
Paul was our mutterer. “I don’t like nuns,” he said. “Never liked ’em. Nuns are fuckin’ creepy as shit. They’re creepy. Married to God? What is that? That’s fuckin’ psycho.” Maybe he was talking to us, but nobody answered him.
Every so often my hand swiped in front of me for Jamie, almost an involuntary move, like my palm had Tourette’s, me gripping a handful of the damp cotton T-shirt and twisting it, pulling it tighter and tighter, stretching the fabric taut across his skin, same as I did to my own pant leg when I rode the Tilt-A-Whirl at a parking-lot carnival. Jamie didn’t say a thing about it, and he didn’t laugh but instead let me cling to him like that as we fumbled and tripped our way to the door leading the hell out of there.
Though the old stairs sagged beneath us, the
stairwell was draped in a filmy light from the open doorway to the floor above. Jamie “Fuck-yeahed!” as he reached the top and Paul and Murphy echoed something similar, all of us wrapped in the giddy elation that comes with escape.
It was still soon enough after the shutdown that some electricity remained on in the building (upstairs, anyway), and even though it seemed too modern for its surroundings, the fact that, at the end of the hallway, an EXIT sign glowed its appropriate Christmas-light red, gave me comfort, somehow, a sense of normalcy. Because nothing else about that hospital was normal.
That day we only had time for the old wing, and that was plenty. It was all tall archways and gold foil wallpaper, too decadent to resemble the stark hospital rooms we knew from our checkups. There were green couches, definitely antiques, and in one corner there was even a piano, a baby grand. As soon as he saw it, Murphy charged the bench and clanked out a pause-filled “Heart and Soul” while Jamie and Paul tackled each other the way boys do when they’re pumped up with excitement and thrown together in a place where you’re supposed to behave—or at least were once supposed to behave. Above us, stern nuns in crisp whites watched our intrusion from the strokes of a massive oil painting housed in a gilt frame.
When Jamie proposed a toast to the “broads of God,” I raised the bottle to the painting and drank a swig, same as the guys. This time the schnapps burned hard all across the roof of my mouth, the back of my throat, and I coughed some of it out, embarrassed.